The South China Morning Post reports that the U.S. may be taking a stand against China. This week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a new bill that would “tighten export controls on China-bound U.S. technology that could be used to ‘suppress individual privacy, freedom of movement and other basic human rights’ [and] ordering the U.S. president, within four months of the legislation’s enactment, to submit to Congress a list of Chinese officials deemed responsible for, or complicit in, human rights abuses in Xinjiang…
“The UIGHUR Act also demands that, on the same day, those individuals are subject to sanctions under the Global Magnitsky Act, seizing their U.S.-based assets and barring them from entry onto U.S. soil.”
Reuters notes that American government officials “have sounded the alarm on China’s detention of at least a million Uighur Muslims, by U.N. estimates, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang as a grave abuse of human rights and religious freedom…”
U.S. congressional sources and China experts say Beijing appears especially sensitive to provisions in the Uighur Act passed by the House of Representatives this week banning exports to China of items that can be used for surveillance of individuals, including facial and voice-recognition technology…
A U.S. congressional source also said a Washington-based figure close to the Chinese government told him recently it disliked the Uighur bill more than the Hong Kong bill for “dollars and cents reasons,” because the former measure contained serious export controls on money-spinning security technology, while also threatening asset freezes and visa bans on individual officials. Victor Shih, an associate professor of China and Pacific Relations at the University of California, San Diego, said mass surveillance was big business in China and a number of tech companies there could be hurt by the law if it passes.
China spent roughly 1.24 trillion yuan ($176 billion) on domestic security in 2017 — 6.1% of total government spending and more than was spent on the military. Budgets for internal security, of which surveillance technology is a part, have doubled in regions including Xinjiang and Beijing.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot